The Church of the Holy Dodger Dog

As I sat in Dodger Stadium, watching thousands of people stream onto the outfield to “recommit themselves to Christ,” it suddenly occurred to me that this was an ideal moment to get up and get myself a Dodger Dog. The concession lines would probably be empty, because for the first time in about three hours those in the stands were forced to choose between getting a third helping of nachos and getting born again.

I know for a fact I wasn’t the only one thinking about food at the moment. The second I entered Dodger Stadium the first thing I noticed was a sea of people carrying what looked like shipping containers filled with nachos to their families. Once I sat down, after wading through puddles of peanut shells, I noticed that everyone around me had a crate of hotdogs in their laps. As I looked around half expecting to find a man shouting that he has Cracker Jacks for sale, I noticed the pile of peanut shells rapidly growing into a flood of Noachian proportions.

Still though, even though the worshippers were eating enough food to feed a sizeable nation, I was willing to give religion at Dodger Stadium a chance. Truth be told, I couldn’t help fantasizing what it would have been like if I had showed up with a baseball glove and a Dodger t-shirt, wandering around the stands looking really confused. Would there be a seventh inning stretch? But, really, I gave it a shot.  I laughed off the fact that we were bouncing a beach ball around the stands, and I brushed off the fact that one Christian lady cussed out her fellow Christians for dropping the ball when it came to continuing The Wave.

But then came the prayer. Some pastor took to the stage to lead some generic “just” prayer, and the stadium reverently bowed its heads. At this point I noticed that, yes, people had bowed their heads. But some, and a fair few, continued to stuff food in their mouths…while keeping their heads bowed in prayer.

How do you pray and eat at the same time? Am I just spectacularly uncoordinated that I think this would prove difficult? If nothing else it seems disrespectful. “Dear Lord, SNARF we just want to GARRR thank you for just GULP giving us today and just HAAMMM just making us URGH all that we just are….”

Looking around at people bowing their heads and closing their eyes in reverence while shoveling Dodger Dogs into their mouths was perhaps the highlight of my life. It was at this point that I started laughing so hard that I cried.

These are the things I missed this past year in the English Anglo-Catholic world. And how would this year have been different? I imagined a world of seminarians eating nachos while kneeling in prayer. Of half a congregation getting up during the middle of the Creed in Latin to go get another suitcase-sized bag of peanuts. Or of choral evensong in St. Paul’s being interrupted by a fat man in a t-shirt letting out an echoing hearty belch fueled by gallons of non-alcoholic beer.

But no. it could never happen in England, and not just the non-alcoholic beer part. This Church at Dodger Stadium is such an American expression of Church—not the fact that it’s a megachurch, not the greasy charisma, not the red/white/blue color scheme, not the jokes about other people’s bad hygiene, but the FOOD.

And you know what, America? This is why we are all fat.  This is a sign of the end times—Americans who bother coming to “church” cannot put their hot dogs or frozen lemonades down for the one minute it takes to say a prayer.

Aw crap though. Now my next visit to a “normal” church is going to feel sorely lacking in Dodger Dogs.

Yet another subject I suck at teaching

(from yesterday)

In addition to being the worst geography teacher ever, I found out today that I’m the worst food tech teacher (home ec teacher for Americans) in the history of English education. Not because I don’t know any proper information about food (well, I don’t), but because I am a firm believer in bowl-licking. Should I ever become a mother, I will probably be one of the few in the history of the modern world that would not shriek, “BUT YOU’LL GET SALMONELLA!” when I catch my children eating more brownie mix than they’ve poured into a baking dish. No, I’ll say, “Eat up!”

And all 28 of my theoretical children will die of salmonella.

So today in food tech we were working with cake icing—salmonella was not an issue here as icing is just sugar and butter. However, as a teaching assistant for today’s six lessons I was expected to figuratively slap the hands of the little devils who stuck their hands into their bowls of icing for a cheeky little taste. And THIS has proven to be my most challenging task as a teacher. Because I can’t blame them for it. I mean, fuck me, if I weren’t 23 and a trainee teacher I’d be fighting those kids tooth and nail for a share of their icing. God bless ‘em, lick away, the time when that will no longer be socially acceptable is fast approaching for people their age. Lick away, children.

On a related note, I hated that the proper teachers made one class leave their cupcakes for later because the kids had gym immediately afterwards and would get sick. That’s the whole fucking point. If you eat yourself sick after the age of 18 you’re a pig, but under 18 and you’re just a kid. Let kids be kids, I say.

But back to my main point: licking the bowl. It’s hard to tell the kids off for something I don’t think is all that wrong (yeah, I know it’s not hygienic in general, but in this instance it was a private bowl of icing, not for public consumption). To me it’d be like telling the kids off for liking Doctor Who or wanting to learn Hebrew. Some of the poor dears didn’t want to be naughty and asked me, “Can I lick the bowl?” And I had a burning desire to yell, “FUCK YEAH!” and triumphantly pump my fist in the air.

Realizing that if I acknowledged their question I would have to tell them no and kill a part of my soul, I chose to tactfully ignore the question. After their question I would let my eyes suddenly glaze over and act as though, “Oh wow, something absolutely fascinating just happened out the window and I’m going to walk away from you now to go check it out.” And then I secretly hoped that they would take the opportunity to go ahead, embrace their joyful youth, and shove a hearty thumbful of pink frosting into their mouths while none of the teachers were looking.

The problem is that towards the end of every lesson the kids got wise, and those mischievous surreptitious dips into their bowls of frosting gradually turned into blatant icing feasts. Which, let me clarify, I do not give one solitary shit about. The other teachers, however, kept glaring at me whenever a child would snarf some icing and I said nothing to the child in question.

Finally this one kid was quite overtly piping frosting directly into his mouth. I thought this was the greatest thing I’d seen all day, as this kid was clearly the happiest kid on the planet, with his head tipped all the way back and the piping bag in the air guiding a steady supply of blue heaven into his mouth. He just looked absolutely thrilled, with that look of joy on his face that you rarely see in children at school. Part of me wanted to give him a nod of solidarity, as if to say, “I’m with you in spirit, buddy. If you fuckers weren’t in this room with me I’d definitely give that a go.” But responsibility kicked in.

Not wanting to be too much of a hypocrite, I chose to say something friendly, something like, “You know, that icing would taste much better if you put it on the cupcake you’re decorating first.”

And this boy briefly put his bag of diabetes down and let the mirth disappear from his face. Suddenly he became very serious as he told me, “No, it wouldn’t, Miss.” He wasn’t trying to be cheeky, he was just speaking the truth.

All I could do was look at him, smile, and say, “You’re right.”

Hanging out with a cat.

From 10/4/11 and 10/3/11
So I pretty much sat next to Lauren Cooper today. And, much like the adults in those sketches, I had not the faintest idea how to get young Lauren to shut the fuck up. But that truly deserves its own blog post, and I can only write about it after the homicidal urges have subsided. And when I say homicidal urges I actually mean the urge to drown my sorrows with cheesecake. Which I am doing right now.

Instead today I’d like to talk about a cat called Gemma that I became friends with on Monday. Being the socially awkward and inept person that I am, she might very well have been the ONLY friend I made on Monday. I’d like to think that the fact that I am fully aware of my awkwardness kind of puts me one step ahead of, say, PhD students, but this might be a purely theoretical distinction.

Anyway: Gemma. The chilliest cat in all of England. So basically I just sat with her outside for about half an hour. To be honest it wasn’t all that interesting. And quite frankly the only reason I sat with her in the first place was that I just thought she was ill. Mostly because I think all cats look ill. Probably because they’re not dogs.

So I was just chilling—okay, I have to interrupt myself here and say that the English people I’ve met have overwhelmingly used the word “chillaxing,” which is something I thought only dweeby 14-year-olds in the Midwest still said because they thought it was still the done thing in California. But apparently it’s still going strong here. Anyway. So I was just chilling with Gemma, waiting for someone who knew cats better than I did (basically anybody) to walk by, but no one came. So it was just me sitting with this cat who was making this weird moaning sound that I assumed at the time was a cat swan song but that I guess in retrospect is just extremely posh meowing that apparently American cats don’t do.

And my response was to just stroke her. Every now and then I’d stop stroking her because I was afraid she was dying and I really just didn’t want to turn today into a day in which I stroked a dead cat. But then I thought that would be really uncharitable of me, and the key word of the house today seemed to be “charity” (well, that and “cake”), so I continued stroking her and desperately prayed that she wouldn’t die. At least not while I was touching her.

I kept talking to her, calling “Gemma!” quite a bit, because I figured that when you do that to dying people they hang on a little longer. (“Gemma, you’re going to be fine. We’re going to see Venice, don’t you remember? Don’t you remember how you wanted to see Venice, Gemma? You just gotta hang on.”) While remaining slightly doubtful as to whether or not it works on cats, I thought it couldn’t hurt. Having briefly considered whether or not meowing at her would be more productive, I decided that there was definitely a boundary of weirdness that even I wasn’t prepared to cross. So I just continued my little chat with quite possibly the worst conversation partner ever.

Finally someone did walk by and I asked him whose cat it was. Turns out she belongs to the professor who gave me my own copy of the New Testament in Greek a couple weeks ago. The same professor who, whenever he says so much as “Hello, Sam” in the hallway, causes me to cower in reverence and fear of his NT skills. This is his cat. (Urge to make “Magnificat” pun rising…)
Well, fuck. If his cat dies in my presence that’ll probably piss him off and then he’ll probably ask for the New Testament back. …HANG IN THERE, GEMMA!

The guy who came across my little makeshift vet office (Dr. Sam: I cure your pets with love and slightly squeamish stroking) seemed really unconcerned about Gemma, so she must be doing okay. And I’ll admit I didn’t really want to press the issue because he’s part of the ordinand crew, and they scare me somewhat for two reasons: 1) sometimes, particularly during mass, they wear dresses, and 2) I know they can just tell what an asshole I truly am, as most people can, but then they’re going to tell God about it, and then, well, I’m just totally fucked.

Casually waiting for the ordinand to round the corner, I started to get up, and as I did so I reflected on the fact that I just spent a sizeable fraction of an hour talking to a cat. And it was still probably the most productive thing I did all day.

But as I stood up and reflected a most horrific realization dawned on me: ooooooh Jesus have I been sitting in a bad spot. I’d been sitting Indian style right in front of the open door that leads straight to the kitchen. The way I was sitting you couldn’t see from the kitchen that I was with a cat. SO basically it just looked like I was camping out in front of the kitchen.

Look, I don’t mind if the cook thinks I’m just a hungry fatass who is sitting in front of the kitchen at 1 in the afternoon because she wants to be first in line for dinner at 7—in fact, I’d prefer that. But unfortunately I’m pretty sure that even before this incident I’d already managed to accidentally convince the cook here that I have some kind of an unhealthy obsession with him. To be fair, my passionate and extremely loud declaration of love for him when he served me my first taste of Indian food probably sent mixed signals.

you knew this post was coming.

I’ve actually lost a bit of weight here—true, I still look like a manatee with glasses, but it has gotten to the point where pairs of once-tight pants (trousers, not underpants, if any Brits are reading this) have started slipping down, causing me to either rely on the one belt I own or frantically hike up the waistband every five steps like I’m doing a folk dance. Part of me is thrilled about the possibility of at some point no longer being the Fat American, but then the practical part of me is sort of panicked about how I will be able to afford new pants should this trend continue. I’m terrified that I’m going to be on my school placement and I’ll be known as that strange teacher who holds up her pants with hemp ropes like a sack of potatoes. “Do you know Sam?” “Ah yes, she’s that well-educated hobo, right?”

The problem is that British food is absolutely vile. Look, I love this country, I so very badly want to be able to smugly tell my friends back home that even the food here is fantastic, but unfortunately here in England I’m frequently confronted by plates of food that I could not, even in my vague liberal artsish way of fudging the boundaries of my knowledge, pretend to be able to identify.

Occasionally I CAN identify what I’m eating, and that’s even worse. For example, steak and kidney pie. WHY? And I don’t mean why in the curious, academic sense. I mean it in the aching religious sense, the crisis of faith sense, where you ask God from the very depths of your soul how an omnibenevolent being could possibly treat his creation so terribly in allowing man to invent steak and kidney pie. It really is The Problem of Evil. I honestly believe that there should be special death camps set aside for people who serve other people steak and kidney pies. And, being in theory a candidate for Hitler’s own death camps, I think I’m allowed to say things like that.

Sometimes the food isn’t bad, it’s just put into weird combinations. For example, I keep seeing restaurants that serve baked potatoes with tuna (instead of sour cream, chives, bacon and cheese—like a NORMAL baked potato). WHY WOULD YOU PUT TUNA IN A BAKED POTATO? What on God’s green earth could have possibly possessed you when you dreamt up that unholy union? I mean, Jesus Christ, no wonder you lost the Empire.

Then there’s the whole issue of baked beans. Apparently people here eat baked beans with their bacon and eggs in the morning. I personally don’t see what business beans have coming to breakfast. I want to look the beans right in the eye and ask, “Who the fuck invited you?”

It’s not all bad though. The sweets have been fantastic. Last week I was inducted into the world of biscuits, and I have now heard the Gospel of Trifle. I find myself running home from class each day, literally sprinting through the park and bowling over old women trudging along with their shopping who dare stand between me and cake, just so I can make it back in time for cake. (How twee and British is it that my college serves us cake every afternoon? But that’s something that deserves its own blog post.)

And also in fairness the non-British food I’ve had here has been pretty fantastic. I’m eating shawarma like I’m back in Israel, and I have so many kebab shop options near my apartment that I’ve decided that from now on I will not eat at kebab shops that cut the meat off with an electric turkey carver. No, I will insist my shawarma be cut off with one of those bigass knives that look like samurai swords. Come to think of it, I think I’ll insist on using a samurai sword for all knife functions. How fantastic would it be to spread strawberry jelly on toast with a knife so large you’d have to clear everyone out of the way beforehand? (“OH MY GOD, GET OUT OF THE WAY—SAM’S SPREADING MARGARINE!” “OH GOD NO, THINK OF THE CHILDREN!” “AAAA!”) I think it’d lend a nice air of drama that is so sadly lacking at meals nowadays.